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Friday, 18 October 2013

Revolutionaries, movements and class

Manchester, 29 September 2013. Photo: Mark Husmann

The revolutionary socialist tradition is characterised by commitment to the centrality of the working class to struggles for emancipation and to building a revolutionary party as an essential component of that struggle. But, according to a new article in International Socialism journal, the pressure of events has influenced successive waves of revolutionaries to succumb to movementism, which is marked by a rejection of these core ideas. This current political trend is reportedly a rightward-deviating break from the revolutionary tradition.

‘The politics of the
crisis in the SWP’ – by leading Socialist Workers Party members Alex
Callinicos and Charlie Kimber – includes a defence of the SWP leadership’s
positions in recent internal party debates and of its handling of accusations
of rape and sexual harassment against a leading member. However, it is also an
attempt to locate the specific debates inside the SWP over the last year among
larger social and political trends. The authors’ dominant idea is that the
political tendency they call ‘movementism’ has pulled layers of revolutionaries
away from the tradition.

A great dealhas been written about the specific
controversies in the SWP recently. The debate prompted by the Central
Committee's response to allegations against Martin Smith, former SWP national
secretary, is a tremendously important one in its own right. This article is
not adding to the discussion about those particular issues - there are well-informed
accounts elsewhere.

The SWP crisis has prompted some written commentary on
wider political issues than those at the heart of the dispute. A common idea in
much discussion is that what's gone wrong in the SWP has been a corrosion of
democratic culture. This is true - the party's democratic culture has decayed
badly. But we need to explain why that decay may have happened in relation to the
organisation's actions in the outside world. Otherwise we are left with
accounts of an inadequate democratic culture that can easily lapse into
implying that any such attempts at building revolutionary organisation are
doomed.

The long-term crisis of the SWP is not merely a crisis of
democratic culture or of organisational form. It is a crisis of political
strategy and orientation. This is important for anyone who wants to build more
effective revolutionary organisation. We have to understand what has gone wrong
in order to learn the right lessons. We mustn't throw the Leninist baby out
with the SWP's dirty bathwater. The issues involved are fundamental to
socialist strategy today and therefore require serious attention.

Leninism,
left reformism and movementism

The International Socialism article was pre-figured by a
talk by Callinicos at Marxism 2013, which explicitly criticised
Counterfire’s John Rees. Callinicos claimed that Rees had abandoned fundamental tenets
of Marxism by supposedly emphasising protest movements and suggesting they are equivalent
to strikes. In the International Socialism article, Callinicos and Kimber extend
this criticism by claiming: ‘Counterfire has become little more than decorative
coverage for the efforts by Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite, to
rebuild the Labour left.’ (no reference or link is provided to support this
particular claim, which in fact has no basis in reality).

The basis for the criticisms Callinicos made in July was
a remark made at the People’s Assembly. This is what John Rees said in the closing
session of the People’s Assembly:

“Some people want to say that there is one form of protest
superior to all others, that direct action is superior to marching, that
strikes are better than marching, that direct action is superior to strikes.
Don’t be ridiculous! We need them all, we need every single one of them. We are
going to need to break this government. And if we are going to break this
government, we are going to need to demonstrate, to strike, to take direct
action..."

Rees was moving the People’s Assembly declaration in this
speech, which contained a series of practical priorities including the 29
September national demonstration at Tory conference, a day of civil
disobedience on 5 November and the building of local People’s Assemblies
alongside pledging practical solidarity with strike action against cuts. It
isn’t clear which of these practical initiatives Callinicos regarded as
unimportant and unworthy of a mention. And in fact the course of events has been as predicted: some highly successful local and regional People's Assemblies, a mass demonstration in Manchester, strike action accompanied by big regional street protests, and a day of direct action planned for 5 November which, not by accident, is now preceded by a CWU national strike the day before. Leading UCU activist Sean Vernell appears to refute the narrow view offered by Callinicos when he writes:'Too often the debate about the street versus the workplace is a sterile one with a false polarisation between the two. Socialists welcome all and any forms of protest against any aspect of injustice or poverty... Strikes and street protests are sometimes simplistically counterposed. However, both are going to be vital in defeating the government's offensive.'Callinicos and Kimber argue that the trend of ‘movementism’ is shaped by a wider context characterised by widespread street protest coupled with low levels of strike action. Movementism and left reformism are viewed by the authors as two sides of the same coin: left reformism is focused on parliament and the Labour Party while movementism is concerned with street-based protest movements, but they are both given greater radical legitimacy by supposed ex-revolutionaries who reject revolutionary organisation and downplay the role of 'organised workers' in social change. This 'downplaying' is treated as synonymous with writing off the working class as a political actor.'Movementism':
the origins of a concept

The critique of 'movementism' involves identifying three
linked characteristics: giving up the project of building a revolutionary
party, rejecting the agency of the working class, and a commitment to movement
building as a central priority. The term was first revived in 2008/09, as a way
of justifying the SWP leadership's sharp turn away from the sort of united
front building (Stop the War, Respect, anti-capitalism) that had characterised
the previous period. A positive project of movement-building was swiftly turned
into a negative trend of 'movementism', with lots of dark mutterings about the
dangers of 'liquidationism' and 'dilution' of Marxist politics.

I will return to the current debate about 'movementism'
below, but first let's consider where the concept comes from. It is a creature
of the downturn for working-class struggle that began in the mid-1970s. The
disorientation of the revolutionary left followed the ending of the
international upturn in working class struggles in around 1975 - with the
defeat of the Portuguese Revolution, Italy's 'historic compromise', Britain's
'social contract', the end of mass workers' unrest and so on. The end of the
upturn was accompanied by a general shift to the right and a profound weakening
of rank-and-file workers' organisation. This was complemented by the
marginalisation of Marxist ideas (replaced, over time, with ideas labelled
'poststructuralist', 'postmodernist' etc) and a move into the Labour Party by former revolutionaries attracted by the rise of Bennism.

One aspect of this downturn was increasing emphasis on
the role played by 'social movements'. This trend was regarded on
the revolutionary left as a shift to the right because it downplayed class
politics, wrote off any need for independent revolutionary organisation
(deploying rhetoric about how 'Leninism' was dated, undemocratic and
patriarchal), and paid little attention to trade union activity. Criticising
such 'movementism' did not mean neglecting the kind of issues that it tended to
promote like gender, race and sexuality. It did mean having a distinct Marxist
analysis of such issues combined with a practical approach that emphasised
connections between oppressed groups and the working class movement. It also
put the stress on mass activity, rather than elitist and separatist forms of
action. The 'social movements' were not class-wide movements of protest but rather sectional campaigns which, though they didn't need to be, were often counterposed to a supposedly outdated class politics.

Having a critical stance towards 'movementism' was
important for the revolutionary left: in a hostile climate, where there was
considerable pressure from the right, it was necessary to maintain a distinctive
Marxist pole and that often meant emphasising differences with others, while
nonetheless working with others in joint political action. The critique of
movementism was a historically specific critique that responded to a
fashionable rejection of revolutionary organisation coupled with a downplaying
of any emphasis on the working class as collective agent of social change.

Many SWP activists were involved in campaigning to defend
abortion rights in the mid-1970s (indeed Lindsey German was a founder member of the National Abortion Campaign). The Anti Nazi League was launched in 1977 and
formed a huge part of the party's activities until 1979. The SWP took the riots
in Brixton and elsewhere very seriously (they were not a distraction from the
'class struggle'). The CND demonstrations of the early 1980s were important for
the party, while the period also saw attempts to relate to fights over
oppression. There may have been a strong critique of 'movementism', but this
was not a period of abstention from real-live movements. The critique of
movementism was in fact quite precise: it was a critique of various forms of
identity politics and their relationship to a drift by some from the
revolutionary left into Labour Left politics. From the mid-1980s onwards the
term almost completely disappeared from SWP discourse.

Building
the revolutionary left in an age of mass movements

In the aftermath of the big Seattle anti-WTO protests of
November/December 1999, there was a turn towards anti-capitalist organising by
the SWP. This was particularly marked by mobilisations to the large-scale
anti-capitalist protests in Prague, Genoa and elsewhere, participation in the
World and European Social Forums, and by attempts to develop stronger networks
domestically, e.g. a Globalise Resistance speaking tour in early 2001 drew
turnouts that make it comparable to recent People's Assembly public rallies
around the country.

A key element in this anti-capitalist work was an
emphasis on winning trade union backing for initiatives - while more anarchist
or autonomist elements in the movement tended to be dismissive of this - and
articulating a resolutely anti-systemic politics against the movement's more
moderate elements. Simultaneous to this growth of anti-capitalist activity, the
SWP became centrally involved in important new electoral initiatives while
continually endeavouring to link electoral work to broader efforts to build the
left and the working class movement.

From September 2001 onwards the Stop the War Coalition
gave fresh impetus to both the anti-capitalist networks and the electoral work:
the former was reflected, for example, in the centrality of anti-imperialist
politics to London's European Social Forum in October 2004, and the latter
found expression in the emergence of Respect from the anti-war movement (in
particular, but not limited to, the relationships developed with some Muslims
who had not previously associated with the radical left).

None of this movement-building was an example of the kind
of 'movementist' thinking which had previously been criticised. It reflected
new opportunities which were opening up: the anti-capitalist and anti-war
movements were an extremely welcome shift in our political direction and
provided a vital new audience for us. The political movements of the last decade or so have been a response to three decades of a generalised ruling class re-structuring of the world, involving neoliberalism at home and, more recently, the new imperial offensive of the 'war on terror'. Callinicos and Kimber themselves provide
a summary of the period which is similar to that which I have outlined,
but they argue that the experience of building coalitions pulled a layer of
revolutionaries away from the SWP’s traditional commitment to working class
self-emancipation and the accompanying need for independent revolutionary
organisation.That is indeed a real danger. No doubt there have been
individual examples of it happening. But it is a grossly inaccurate
characterisation of many critics of the current SWP leadership, including those
of us seeking to build a new revolutionary socialist organisation in the form
of Counterfire. In fact the commitment to movement building reflects, as it has
done for over a decade, two core understandings: in an era of political
radicalisation and protest movements, revolutionaries can most effectively
build their own organisation and spread their ideas by participating centrally
in the movements; and, secondly, movement-building is not an alternative to the
working class, but rather a particular expression of working class resistance
and organisation. Trade unions remain hugely important and need to be an arena
of political action for revolutionaries, but limiting ourselves to them would
be foolish.

The emergence of the anti-capitalist and anti-war
movements, against a backdrop of continuing low levels of industrial struggle,
meant that working class resistance followed a very different pattern to the 1960s and 1970s,
the era which had been the context for the growth of the International
Socialists (forerunners of the SWP). It was also very different to the downturn
of the 1980s, which had largely shaped the modern SWP. It was generally political and
ideological issues which provided the cutting edge for resistance. SWP founder Tony
Cliff, shortly before his death in 2000, grasped the new opportunities which
were opening up and urged changes in how the SWP should operate, moving away
from the more routinist and propagandist approaches necessary to survive the
downturn years, turning the party outwards to embrace new developments (a number of those who worked most closely with Cliff in his later years are now involved in building Counterfire or Scotland's International Socialist Group).

This 'political upturn' was typically expressed in street
protest, but it's important to recognise that this phenomenon was - and
continues to be - reflected in the trade unions. Callinicos and Kimber make a
passing reference to political trade unionism, but the SWP leadership has in
fact forgotten the lessons learnt in the early years of this century. The
political and ideological levels have still not been matched by a sustained
rise in struggle in the workplaces. This fact has been largely ignored by the
SWP leadership in the last few years, but it is something that fundamentally
influences how revolutionaries ought to respond to austerity.

Industrial action
cannot be seen in isolation from the political context and from developments in
the wider labour movement. This is a general truth that finds particular resonance in the present period. In the last few years the biggest street demonstrations have been organised by the trade unions; the 26 March 2011 TUC national demonstration, involving half a million people, fuelled momentum towards the co-ordinated strikes on 30 June 2011 and, on a still larger scale, 30 November 2011. Those strike days involved the biggest local anti-cuts protests many areas have seen to date, with several hundred thousand people protesting nationwide on 30 November. The growing People's Assembly movement, the large and vibrant
29 September demo and Miliband's very hesitant leftward shift - itself a
product of pressures from protests, trade unions and public opinion - have all
given confidence to some trade unioniststo go for strike action. And when strike action happens its most visible
expression is often in public protest, something we have seen this week with the strikes, marches and rallies by teachers.

The new popular revolts

Globally, recent years have been characterised by fresh
popular revolts. There are many differences between - to take some high-profile
examples – Tunisia and Egypt (at the highest level of revolution) and disparate
examples ranging between Turkey, Brazil, Spain and the Occupy movement, but
there are also some unifying characteristics. They have been centred on major
cities and the main focus of resistance has tended to be the streets and the
squares; occupations of public space and street protests have been central to
the movement (though in Egypt, where popular struggle has reached higher levels
than anywhere else, there has also been massive unrest outside the urban
centres while strikes, throughout the country, have played an important role).

Young
people have played a defining role, though these have not been primarily
generational movements. They have been largely movements of the working class,
but that means unorganised workers, unemployed people and often students as
well as trade unionists (and where trade union members have been involved it
hasn't necessarily been via their union).

A broad mix of ideas has emerged in discussions and
debates, with a lack of ideological coherence or clear political leadership.
This is a result of the relative historic decline of traditional social
democracy (Labour and its equivalents elsewhere), the small scale of the
revolutionary left and the intellectual marginalisation of Marxist ideas. The
last few years in particular have - under pressure from capitalist crisis in
its different forms - seen a marked growth in such movements. However, there
has also been an absence of radical political leadership to help give them
direction. Egypt's predicament - with mass demonstrations followed by the
military taking advantage of the lack of popular political organisation and
leadership in the movement to instigate a
counter-revolution - is really a vivid, large-scale version of the strengths
and weaknesses in many different centres of resistance.

The last few years have reminded us that mass strikes – while
still a vitally important form of class struggle - are not in fact the only kind of mass
working class struggle. Chartism was a mass working class movement but it
was far from being only a strike movement. The Paris Commune wasn't mainly a struggle
fought in the workplaces. Many other examples can be given.

In British history, even the high points of trade union
struggle - including the New Unionism in the late 1880s, the Great Unrest
before World War One and the explosion of strikes in 1919-21 - were shaped and
characterised by forms of action that went beyond the limits of the unions. All
of those phases of mass workers' struggle were preceded and accompanied by big
protest movements over political and economic questions. Mass strikes
themselves have always involved marches, protests, meetings and other forms of
activity – and have never been centred solely in the workplaces. The class
struggle operates, as Engels noted, in the ideological, political and economic
dimensions. But it also operates through different forms. Economic grievances
don't only find expression in strikes.

The poll tax, as Callinicos and Kimber observe, was a
mass working class movement, but one that involved no strike action. In the
Arab world, rises in food prices and the growth of graduate unemployment were
big factors driving the revolts which began in Tunisia in December 2010. Public
transport costs lit the fuse of revolt in Brazil. More generally, it is
impossible to make sense of the wave of popular revolts and revolutions since
2008 - from Occupy to the indignados, from Greece to the Arab uprisings -
without registering the impact of economic crisis. Directly economic issues
often become enmeshed with 'political' problems like the role of police
violence or the hollowing out of democracy.

Organised workers will be at the strategic centre of any successful revolutionary movement. This is one of the great lessons, still as relevant as ever, of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the wave of revolutionary upheavals which followed in its wake. Rebuilding trade unions - and workers 'confidence to take strike action - is a central priority. We are seeing signs of a growing spirit of resistance in the unions right now, including teachers', higher education workers' and firefighters' strikes this month and a national post workers' strike lined up for 4 November. But as well as winning arguments for strike action - and the projects of recruiting and workplace organising which are linked to such action - the process of rebuilding confidence also involves the development of wider movements of resistance.

Roots
of the SWP crisis

The two turning points in the SWP's longer-term decay
were the Respect split of November 2007
and the economic crash of September 2008. In the wake of these developments
there was a sharp turn in the party's perspectives, which was strongly opposed
by a small minority of us - who at the time were still members of the SWP, and
who are mostly now in Counterfire or Scotland’s International Socialist Group.
The Respect split and its aftermath led to a significant layer of cadre
believing that a turn away from united front building, and towards a model of
'party building' familiar from the 1980s downturn, was necessary. By the time
of the financial crash in autumn 2008 there was a mood for retrenchment, for
strengthening a steady routine of branch meetings and paper sales at the
expense of wider engagement with others in the movement.

This mood of retrenchment was strengthened after the Crash,
when the majority of the party leadership rejected arguments for
coalition-building responses to the crisis and instead advocated a narrower
'party building' response. There were arguments, for example, that selling
Socialist Worker at workplaces was the main way we should respond to the
crisis, or that the SWP - having argued for years that a return to economic
crisis was imminent - could reap the rewards of being vindicated by recruiting
directly to the party in large numbers, with less need for such mediating
mechanisms as united fronts. Some of us rejected the new line, but we were in a
minority. The minority’s arguments about strategy were underpinned by our
recognition of broader changes. Here is how a
Counterfire article from January of this year – on the SWP crisis –
expressed it:

‘Underlying this conception, although not adequately
formulated in Party debates at the end of the last decade, was a recognition that
both the British working class had changed, and that our own forms of
organisation needed to adapt with and to it. Trade unions were essential as the
bedrock working class institution, but could not be the only game in town for
socialists. Their recent strength has been in their contribution to movements
of political protest, which include one day strikes, rather than in prolonged
industrial action. None of this implies for an instant a retreat from the
principle that the working class is the key agent of change in capitalist
society. But as Engels noted the workers struggle exists in three registers:
ideological, political and economic. In some periods the main form of struggle
may be political and ideological rather than purely economic. To judge the state
of the struggle simply by the level of strike action is to ignore the level of
generalised, politicised anger and opposition that suffuses society today.’

The leadership resorted to vilification and personal
attacks - and increasingly to disciplinary measures including expulsions - in
order to defeat the minority. Many serious problems of internal culture
witnessed in recent months are nothing new. They were also characteristic of
the leadership’s approach to the internal debate in 2009 and early 2010:

‘Suspensions and expulsions preceded conference in
January 2010, again with private online discussions used as a pretext. For the
first time the CC used secret caucuses of its own supporters against the
minority. This was the first time too someone was instructed to stop running a
website. Email accounts were hacked to gain ‘evidence’ for expulsions. Students
who disagreed were invited to leave the party before they were expelled.’

A politically weak leadership, having adopted the wrong
approach, could only prosper if it caricatured the arguments of its internal
opponents and ultimately drive us out of the organisation. By February 2010 it
had become clear that the party was not going to change direction and that
disciplinary measures were becoming a permanent substitute for open, reasoned
debate. We split and founded Counterfire. The SWP drifted more and more towards
a kind of soft syndicalism that overstated the likelihood of sustained
co-ordinated strike action and remained trapped in trade union sectionalism,
while downplaying the opportunities for broader political united fronts against
austerity. This led to the formation of Unite the Resistance in 2011, a trade
union network that rested upon rejecting the case for a broad anti-cuts
coalition (and specifically upon hostility to the Coalition of Resistance,
established the previous year) and instead stressed the important but narrower
terrain of several public sector unions.

Counterfire activists had already worked with a range of
others to establish the Coalition of Resistance, initiated in August 2010 with
a very big launch conference a few months later. This aimed to connect trade
unions to other anti-cuts constituencies, addressed a very wide range of issues
under the umbrella of austerity, and embraced a range of methods (not just
strikes but demonstrations and campaigns). We also sustained a central role in
another genuine coalition addressing a set of major issues, namely Stop the
War. More recently, the Coalition of Resistance has played a big part in
developing the People's Assembly - precisely the kind of big, broad anti-cuts
coalition that we have argued and fought for over time. Unlike CoR and the People's Charter, the SWP's Unite the Resistance has refused to operate within the People's Assembly and carry out anti-austerity activity within its framework.

The SWP leadership's errors of political strategy led on
to further problems. In the course of driving through the new strategy from
late 2008 onwards, it developed a culture of intolerance which has since become
more entrenched. The party apparatus of full-time workers was used to enforce
the leadership's will against dissenting voices, while the leadership has
encouraged factionalism among a layer of loyalist cadre. The SWP developed
greater sectarianism, as it was turning away from the kind of outward-looking
attempts at building coalitions that characterised much of its history. Martin Smith,
the party's national secretary until January 2011, was admired by many party
activists for having spearheaded the new, post-Respect, perspective. It perhaps became difficult for anyone (in the national leadership or the wider party) to challenge his leading role,
however troubling the emerging allegations about his behaviour may have been.

The current SWP crisis is thus part of something bigger
and more long term; without this context it is impossible to understand how it
could have happened in a party with such a strong historic record on women’s
liberation and fighting oppression. It is also important to grasp the political
context because otherwise we are reduced to misguided revisionism about
‘Leninism’, searching for a narrow organisational or internal solution while
ignoring the wider political context. There are many very good socialist
activists in the SWP, yet they are stuck in an organisation that sadly seems to
be in permanent decline.

Arguments
about united front strategy

Instead of a strategic focus on building united fronts
against austerity, a combination of three things was deemed necessary by the
SWP leadership from 2010 onwards: trade union work, narrow 'party fronts'
(Right to Work, Unite the Resistance) and socialist propaganda about the
capitalist crisis (embodied in party routines of branch meetings and paper
sales). Trade union work and propaganda have very important roles, but are
insufficient in themselves. The rejection of a united front approach to the
economic crisis was a serious mistake by the SWP leadership and the main
issue of contention in the SWP faction fight of 2009/10 then the main cause of
the successive splits which led to the formation of Counterfire in 2010 and Scotland’s
International Socialist Group in 2011. Some SWP members are now involved in the
People’s Assembly, which the party formally supports, but there is still a
reluctance to fully commit to it in practice. This is reflected in the
almost-total absence of references to the People’s Assembly from the Callinicos
and Kimber article.

We have argued for five years that building a united
front must be revolutionaries’ central strategic response to the crisis. The
rejection of this by SWP leaders has been justified with three main arguments.
Firstly, it has been argued that the way to defeat austerity is through strike
action and therefore broad coalition-building is of secondary importance
compared to work through the trade unions. Secondly – and this is closely
linked – the tendency of union leaders to betray workers’ struggles has been
regarded as a fatal flaw in any attempts to build an anti-cuts coalition that
includes those very union leaders. Thirdly, the People’s Assembly is viewed
with distrust and suspicion, as essentially a vehicle for a resurgent left
reformism which a genuinely Leninist organisation must guard against.

These arguments are wrong. We need strikes to be bigger,
more numerous and more co-ordinated. But simply calling for a general strike
gets us no nearer to making it a reality. A great deal of resistance to cuts
has been manifested outside the workplace and socialists need to take that
seriously. We cannot substitute wishful thinking for attempts to advance the
actually existing struggle by outlining practical next steps. A higher level of
street protest and campaigning can help encourage greater confidence to strike.
Even if there is a rise in strike action we will still need a range of tactics
to confront the government, not least because protests can involve large
numbers of people who are not organised in trade unions.

It is true that trade union leaders are unreliable
allies, but united fronts are often built with unreliable allies. United fronts
are somewhat unstable formations and there may be times when some forces have
to take action independently of other forces in the united front. That tension
is both inevitable and healthy. But there is also a more concrete point here:
at a time when official union structures and the union bureaucracy are strong,
relative to rank and file organisation, revolutionaries must work with those
union leaders who are sympathetic to a broad coalition against austerity. A
degree of agreement with those leaders is essential to building the movement
successfully in the grassroots, thereby increasing confidence and the potential
for independent action.

This particular criticism of the People’s Assembly is
also strangely inconsistent. The SWP established Unite the Resistance explicitly
on the model of the Communist Party-initiated Minority Movement in the 1920s, which
involved creating a bloc with the trade union bureaucracy. So what we have here
is that a united front is criticised for its links with the trade union
bureaucracy by a party that is self-consciously modelling its operation on an organisation
noted for that very characteristic. In practice the SWP vacillates between voluntarist actions like the storming, led by then national secretary Martin Smith, of the negotiations between British Airways and union representatives and trying (with very limited success) to develop links with some left-wing union leaders.

Finally, the charge that the People’s Assembly is
providing a space for resurgent left reformism is an erroneous view. Many of
those involved in the movement identify with one expression or another of left
reformism. With a hurricane of cuts upon us, people look for shelter to protect
them. A number of factors – the low level of strike action, the small scale of
the revolutionary left, the marginalisation of Marxist ideas – mean that only a
small minority look to revolutionary ideas and organisation, while left
reformism fares somewhat better. This is no reason to neglect coalition
building. Any coalition will contain different currents and there will be some
political and ideological tension. Considering the balance of forces in the
movement, abstention or a lukewarm approach from revolutionaries to broad
coalitions is a recipe for sectarian irrelevance.

One symptom of the SWP's unwillingness to adopt a serious
united front approach to opposing austerity is the increased recourse to
shallow sloganeering. The party has repeatedly called for a general strike
regardless of whether that has been plausible. It reflects a lack of a properly
grounded analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the trade union struggle.
The preoccupation with 'radical' position-taking, at the expense of practical
strategy and tactics, also reflects the growing sectarianism: when a socialist
group is not seriously working to influence events it becomes preoccupied with
having the 'correct' abstract position and the defence of dogma.

Tony Cliff always insisted that revolutionaries must
stare reality in the face and plot a course of action based on an accurate
grasp of the balance of class forces. Over-optimism would only breed
demoralisation, as socialists would be unprepared for any failure to turn grand
expectations into reality. The overwhelming sense of disappointed expectations
after some union leaders backtracked in the pensions dispute, a retreat that
started in December 2011, did much to disorient the SWP. The SWP leadership had
not prepared the organisation for such a turn for the worse - and this is a
factor in the party's recent troubles.

The failure to develop an anti-austerity united front has
been accompanied by a retreat from active participation in an anti-war united
front. The recent victory over Syria - with Cameron forced to drop plans for
British participation in a new war in the Middle East - vindicated the enduring
commitment to Stop the War sustained by Counterfire activists, among others.
The SWP, however, long ago withdrew from serious participation in local Stop
the War groups, despite the party's outstanding role in initiating and building
Stop the War - nationally and locally - from 2001 onwards. Very few SWP members
are now involved in Stop the War and the party hardly ever promotes its events
or distributes its materials. This retreat has been an integral part of the
wider retreat from the 'political upturn' perspective established in the months
and years after Seattle.

It has also been symptomatic of the SWP's move away from
sustained commitment to united fronts as strategic priorities. Callinicos and
Kimber emphasise the party's commendable role in campaigning against the bedroom
tax, which is indeed an important issue, but the lack of long-term strategic
commitment means a tendency to pick up and later drop issues. The same applies
to questions of war: a sudden flurry of brief interest in response to specific
events is no substitute for on-going practical commitment. We live in an era
which requires long-term coalitions in response to austerity and war, not this
sporadic and inconsistent approach.

Leninism, movements and the working class

What is falsely characterised as ‘movementism’ today is
completely different from what was correctly referred to as ‘movementism’ in
the radically different circumstances of the late 1970s and the 1980s.
Revolutionary strategy which stresses the building of broad movements against
austerity, racism and war is a strategy with class politics at its heart. It
involves a commitment to using the strengths of the protest movements to
reinvigorate the trade unions and, especially, to encourage confidence in
workers to use strike action as well as other methods to challenge the
government and employers.

This is, indeed, a key characteristic of the People’s
Assembly, which emphasises a range of tactics and explicitly refers to strikes
as an integral component of the fight to end austerity. This is precisely how
socialists should be shaping a working class movement which also contains people who
largely dismiss trade unions altogether and, conversely, people who are part of
the union movement but reluctant to pursue the kind of mass co-ordinated strike
action we need to win. This commitment to the People’s Assembly does not for a
moment mean abandoning distinctively revolutionary organisation. The building
of united fronts and the building of revolutionary organisation are mutually
complementary poles. The fact that people have rejected one particular
organisation does not mean they have rejected revolutionary organisation
altogether.

Marxists in today’s world need political analysis of
capitalism and the working class as they really are today, a strategy that
reflects actual social forces, and ways of organising that connect with current
forms of resistance and organisation. The defensive repetition of dogma and
abstract truths is no substitute for this. At the core of Leninism is
'principled flexibility', a combination of Marxist principle with flexibility
in tactics and organisational forms. This is linked to a kind of 'open
marxism'. Rather than a closed system of doctrine, theory must be constantly
evolving in interaction with political reality and the lived experience of
class struggle.

Democracy is at the heart of the authentic Leninist
tradition. It is essential for effective action. The centrality of democracy
applies not only to our social and political struggles, but also to our own
organisation. We need to recover authentic democratic centralism and recognise
that the genuine Leninist commitment to internal democracy is radically
different from the 'sect' form, in which an ossified dogmatic orthodoxy is seen
as needing protection against challenge in democratic discussion.

It is essential we reassert the need for revolutionary
organisation, unfashionable as it may be. The sectarian degeneration of the SWP
has, unsurprisingly but mistakenly, encouraged a backlash against the Leninist
tradition. The current trend is to promote 'loose networks' and 'decentralised
organisation', yet experience shows that this generates its own problems of political incoherence, fragmentation and poor democratic accountability (problems I discussed in this article). Reasserting
democratic centralism does not mean importing wholesale the practices and
structures of the pre-1917 Bolshevik Party (which, in any case, changed greatly
over time and varied in different places). The essence of Leninism and the
particular forms it can take need to be separated out. Crucially, what
democratic centralism means in reality - how it is embodied in structures,
procedures, practices - can be quite different for an organisation of modest
size (like today's SWP) compared to one with a genuine mass base like the
Bolsheviks.The need for revolutionary organisation remains rooted in an understanding that real change has to be fought for through action from below. We cannot rely on either politicians or bureaucrats to change things for us, but must instead build broad, democratic coalitions of resistance. To make permanent gains and bring about radical social transformation, revolution will be necessary, in which the repressive state is replaced with a new order based on mass democratic assemblies. To this end we need an organisation of revolutionary socialists rooted in, and shaping, broader working class struggles.

We need to group together those who are consistently
anti-capitalist and recognise the need for fundamental system change. This is
the necessary complement to participation in broader social and political
struggles. It is essential if revolutionaries want to make an impact on the
world around them, rather than being reduced to either sectarian position-taking
or, on the other hand, tailing more moderate elements in the broad labour
movement.

The
future of the revolutionary left

The SWP leadership has developed a narrow conception of
class struggle that regardless of concrete circumstances privileges the call
for strikes – despite actual strike levels being historically low –and
downplays other forms of struggle, deriding them as ‘movementism’. This
confuses a matter of principle, the centrality of the working class as the
agent of change, with strategic and tactical assessments of which actions are
possible at any given moment. This leads to ultra-left propagandism in practice
and crude reductionism in theory. Sean Vernell expresses a more sophisticated view when he writes:'Street protests of all kinds therefore must play a significant part in any real mass movement against austerity - not only because they can, given the right conditions, give confidence to workers to take strike action but also because they play a vital role in winning the battle of ideas within the working class against arguments justifying austerity. The question for the left should not be the street or the workplace but how we can inspire people to campaign and get involved with all types of campaigns to end austerity and for a different world.'

Paul Le Blanc responded
to Callinicos’ criticism of Counterfire by noting that 'a majority of
today’s working class finds itself outside of trade unions and participates in
struggles, necessarily, through mass actions organised by social movements
outside of the workplace... What is dismissed as “movementism” can be essential
to the actual, real-life class struggle.’

There have been times in the past when the SWP made
initial mis-judgements about what forms of action to prioritise. In the late
1970s it was only through experience that the party realised the Rank and File
Movement was going nowhere but the Right to Work Campaign had great potential,
necessarily correcting its perspective (which had previously regarded the rank
and file union work as paramount, while work among the unemployed was a mere
adjunct). In the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85 there was an initial over-estimation
of potential for workers’ action, with a focus on calling for secondary strike
action that quickly turned out to be less important than building practical solidarity
campaigns in localities. When the poll tax was introduced in Scotland the party
adopted the line of calling for strike action by those responsible for
collecting and administering the new tax, while ignoring the emerging
non-payment campaign. Thankfully the line changed when the poll tax was
introduced in England and Wales.

In all three of these cases it was initially assumed that
trade union struggle, especially through strikes and with a combative rank and
file, would be the central means of advancing the movement. This rested on an
over-estimation of union strength in the field of strikes - and in the last
example, that of the poll tax, it also rested on an under-estimation of the potential
for community action. In the 1990s a number of major struggles were expressed
through street protests and campaigning. This was true of the big
demonstrations against pit closures, Anti Nazi League's mobilisations and the
movement against the Criminal Justice Bill. Later, in spring 1999, there were
protests against Nato's war in Kosovo. The late 1990s also saw some indications
of the anti-capitalist movement in the making, from the big protest against
third world debt outside the G7 summit in Birmingham to the Carnival Against
Capital in the City of London.

The examples I cited above were understandable errors, in
the context of a generally correct wider perspective, and were remedied in
time. Now it is different. The entire direction has been wrong since 2008. The
SWP has failed to develop an anti-cuts strategy that reflects real political
forces and the forms of resistance which currently pre-dominate. It is an
approach that threatens to trap it in sectarian isolation. There is little
evidence of re-thinking or positive change. That is, ultimately, what could doom
it to terminal decline. All of its other problems – the crackdown on democracy
and the recourse to disciplinary measures, the dogmatic propagandism, the
endemic factionalism, the falling membership, the chronically weak leadership
etc - need to be reckoned with in that context.

Paul Le Blanc recently
argued that: 'While carrying on serious socialist educational efforts, we
must be involved in mass social struggles in the here-and-now, most definitely
for reforms. This should not be dismissed as “movementism” or as
“left-reformism”… Such initiatives as, for example, the People’s Assembly
should be embraced and whole-heartedly advanced. Efforts such as these are what
can help to create the preconditions for a revolutionary party.’

The revolutionary left has to be part of shaping new
working class struggles. Building a mass anti-austerity movement and expanding the
influence and size of the revolutionary current within it are the two
main challenges we face.Some of this material has been posted previously in a different form on Luna17.